"Prez."
"She up?"
"Not yet."
"Good. Let her sleep. Ford and Miller will escort her over once she’s ready."
I nod and walk through to the back of the house and out the door to the practice pen, where Rogue is already at the rail with his laptop on a folding chair beside him.
He doesn't look up when I come over. "Anything?"
"Nothing on her phone since the photo," he says. "He sent it from a burner. The tower it pinged was a quarter mile off the access road. He was that close, Spur. Half a mile from the gate."
"Yeah."
"I cloned her line. The next time he sends one, I see it before she does."
"How do you know there'll be a next one?"
He looks up at me.
Rogue's got ice-blue eyes that don't blink much and a face that doesn't move when he's thinking.
"Because he sent the photo. Men who send photos send other things. He's escalating. He's going to try something at Abilene. He's not patient enough to wait for OKC."
"You sure?"
"Yeah."
"All right."
He looks back at his screen and types something I can't see.
"Spur?"
"Yeah?"
"Mark her."
I look at him. "What?"
"You heard me. Whatever you're going to do—and we both know you're going to do something—do it before Friday. Mark her. Tattoo her. Send him a picture of it if you want. Tell him he doesn't get her."
The morning breeze moves through the pen, and Jaeger flicks an ear at the gate. "How the fuck do you know I've been thinking about that?"
"Because I've known you for ten years, Spur, and you're a man who marks his territory. You marked your bunk in the prospect house. You marked the round pen post the day Phantom gave it to you. So mark her. Stop circling it."
I don't answer and he doesn't push.
Eventually Dakota comes up the path from my cabin with a coffee in one hand and her hair in a long loose braid down her back, two prospects tailing her.
She walks across the yard to the practice pen, and Rogue and I both stop talking.
She climbs the rail beside me, looks at Jaeger. "You boys gonna stand at this fence the whole time I'm in Texas?"
"That's the plan," Rogue says.
She walks Jaeger out of the gate and into her practice pattern, I watch her work, and I think about what Rogue just told me.
